Like most of C. S. Lewis’s books, The
Screwtape Letters (1942) contains many allusions to or quotations from
unspecified sources. Locating and checking these sources is perhaps never
vitally important, but often proves to be a rewarding enterprise.

What follows is a listing by chapter of many
such words and phrases with brief references to what I have found to be their
sources and, occasionally, notes suggesting their relevance to the context in
which Lewis uses them. I have also included a few other items where a short
explanation may be of use to some readers. The list is based on notes I made
for my Dutch translation of this book, published in 2002 as Brievenuit de hel (fourth edition 2009) to replace a 1947
translation under the same title.

Double question marks in bold type – ?? –
follow items where I have not found the required information. Corrections and
additions including proposed new entries are welcome.

Dedication

To
J. R. R. Tolkien

» John
Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), one of C. S.
Lewis’s intimate friends during the period 1930-1950. They were the key figures
in the “Inklings”, a small informal literary club with weekly meetings where
writing work in progress was read aloud and criticized. Much of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was first
presented there, and Tolkien later wrote that he thought Lewis’s encouragement
had been vitally important for the completion of that huge work. From 1936
onward Lewis dedicated many of his books to fellow Inklings. See Humphrey
Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J.
R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends (George Allen &
Unwin, London 1978; paperback edition HarperCollins, London 1997).

Epigraphs

Martin
Luther (1483-1546) and Thomas More (1478-1535) were
enemies: Luther was the instigator of the Reformation in 1517 while More
developed into a prominent defender of the Catholic church and died for the
cause. Their continued status as heroes of Protestantism and Catholicism
respectively was confirmed in More’s case by his canonization as a Saint in
1935. The joint presentation here of very similar statements from these two men
is a statement on the part of C. S. Lewis. As a Christian writer Lewis took the
general line that he did best to disregard any church divisions and stick to
what he considered the very important stretches of “merely Christian” common
ground (cf. the beginning of Screwtape’s letter 25).
Nevertheless Lewis regarded the divisions of Christendom as a tragedy. He never
wrote much on Luther, but in a 1947 letter he compared Thomas More with another
Protestant adversary, William Tyndale:

All the
writings of the one and all the writings of the other I have lately read right
through. Both of them seem to me most saintly men and to have loved God with
their whole heart: I am not worthy to undo the shoes of either of them.
Nevertheless they disagree and (what racks and astounds me) their disagreement
seems to me to spring not from their vices nor from their ignorance but rather
from their virtues and the depths of their faith, so that the more they were at
their best the more they were at variance.

Lewis
was reading all of More and Tyndale since he had been commissioned to write a
volume on the 16th century for the Oxford History of English Literature. That
book was published in 1954 as English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century. It has long passages on Thomas More
(pp. 165-181), with some references to Luther; and on William Tyndale (pp.
181-192), where Lewis points out “how tragically narrow is the boundary between
Tyndale and his opponents” and “what Tyndale is attacking is a mere travesty of
what his best opponents held; as what they attack is also a travesty of his own
view.”

Five years after The Screwtape Letters appeared, it was read in translation by an
Italian monk called Don Giovanni Calabria, who sensed a peculiar talent for
promoting Church reunion. He wrote a Latin letter of appreciation and a
correspondence followed – all in Latin – which lasted for years. (On a 1947 photograph
of Lewis the Italian Screwtape, or Lettere di Berlicche,can be seen to lie on his desk in the
foreground; this photo was used as a cover illustration for Walter Hoooper’sC. S.
Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 1994.) Lewis’s letters to Calabria were first
published in 1989 with parallel English translation by Martin Moynihan and are
now contained in Lewis’s Collected
Letters, vols. II and III. In both cases Calabria’s surviving letters to
Lewis were included. A much fuller Italian edition was published in 1995 as Una gioiainsolita: Letteretra un pretecattolico
e un laicoanglicano.
The passage quoted above is from the letter of 25 November 1947.

A book called C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (2003) by Joseph Pearce opens with
an observation about the two epigraphs of The
Screwtape Letters:

Not only is
Luther a Protestant and More a Catholic, but these two men are also accounted
champions of their respective parties, each having fought fearlessly for his
own position. What is more, many of their fiercest confrontations were fought
against one another, often in scathing letters and treatises. ... The fact that
both voices recommend laughter at the absurdity of evil is a testament to a
conviction, seen elsewhere in Lewis’s works, that the Christian perspective of
comedy, in both the light-hearted and in the cosmic sense, will in the end win
out over the tragic divisions that have historically beset the Body of Christ
on earth.

“The
best way to drive out the devil ... is to jeer and flout him ...” – Luther

»
From Martin Luther’s Tischreden
(Table Talk). The oldest source for
this quote is JoannesAurifaber’s
edition, first published in 1566 (facsimile reprint 1968), Chapter 25, “VomTeufel und seinenWerken” (“Of the Devil and
his Works”, Fol. 278-307). Lewis used the first and the last sentence of a
page-long section under the sub-heading “Den Teufelkan man mitVerachtungvndlecherlichenPossenvertreiben” (“The Devil
can be chased away by scorn and crazy jokes”), Fol. 290. The last sentence is
in Latin. The following excerpt from this source – followed by a fairly literal
translation – includes two sentences immediately following the first. The words
in italics are roughly those quoted
by Lewis.

Doctor Luther
said that when he couldn’t get rid of the
devil with Holy Scripture and serious language, he had often expelled him by tart
remarks and crazy jokes. And when he [the devil] tried to burden his
[Luther’s] conscience, he would often tell him, “Devil, I’ve been doing it in
my pants, have you smelled it and added this to your list of all my sins?”
Again, he told him, “My dear Devil, should the Blood of Christ shed for my sins
not have been enough, please do pray to God for me.” ... For he is a proud spirit, and
cannot bear scorn.

Not
only does this longer excerpt give a fuller idea of Luther’s jokes; in calling
the Devil a “proud spirit” Luther is also showing all the more resemblance to
Thomas More. In the WeimarerAusgabe, the
standard critical edition of Luther’s works, the passage is printed in volume 6
of the Tischreden
(=TR 6, 1921), pp. 210-211, Nr. 6817.

Lewis was perhaps quoting freely from a
biography of Luther by Jules Michelet (Mémoires de Luther, écrits par lui-même, 1835) in
the form of a compilation of original sayings, as translated from the French by
G. H. Smith (The Life of Luther, gathered
from his own writings, 1846), p. 78 (Book V, ch.
6):

The
best way to expel the devil, if he will not depart for texts from Holy
Scripture, is to jeer and flout him.

While
the phrase “to jeer and flout him” exactly matches the Screwtape epigraph, the final words “He cannot bear scorn” are
lacking both in Smith’s translation and in Michelet’s French text (Vol. 3, p.
188 in the 1835 edition). They do appear, however, in the translation by
William Hazlitt of the same book, also published in 1846 (The Life of Luther, written by himself), p. 332:

The best way
of getting rid of the devil, if you cannot do it with the words of the Holy
Scripture, is to rail at and mock him. He cannot bear scorn.

As
Hazlitt points out in his preface, he used a slightly later French work on
Luther, Audin’sHistoire de la vie, des ouvrages et de la doctrine de Luther (1841, 5th
edition 1845), to make additions to Michelet’s work. Hazlitt “paid especial
attention to the many extracts from the Tischreden”, comparing various translations, including the
earliest (1650) by Captain Bell. Lewis’s presentation as a single saying of
what is really the first and the last sentence of a page-long passage may thus
go back to Hazlitt or one of Hazlitt’s sources.

“The devill ... the prowdespirite ...” – Thomas More

» Thomas More (see note above) was an English scholar
and statesman. The quotation is from his last work, A Dialoge of Comfort against Tribulacion (Book II, ch.
16), written in
prison while he awaited executionfor
treason after refusing to swear an oath declaring King Henry VIII supreme head,
under God, of the Church of England.
The dialogue is between a young Hungarian, Vincent, and his aged uncle Antony, and
set between the battle of Mohács (1526) and the siege
of Vienna (1529), with divided Christendom badly failing to make a united front
against the Turkish onslaught. Antony counsels his nephew about ways to endure
the coming “tribulations” of conquest and domination by the Turks. As they are
talking about the temptation of “horrible thoughts” (including thoughts of
suicide), Antony explains that

the manner of the fight
against temptation must stand in three things: that is, in resisting, and in
contemning, and in the invocation of help.

His second point – contempt – is developed as
follows:

Some folk
have been clearly rid of such pestilent fancies with very full contempt of
them, making a cross upon their hearts and bidding the devil avaunt. And sometimes they laugh him to scorn too, and then
turn their mind unto some other matter. And when the devil hath seen that they
have set so little by him, after certain essays, made in such times as he
thought most fitting, he hath given that temptation quite over. And this he
doth not only because the proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked, but also
lest, with much tempting the man to the sin to which he could not in conclusion
bring him, he should much increase his merit.

C.
S. Lewis, in his book on 16th-century English literature, has called More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulations
“the noblest of all his vernacular writings”. Noting that “it was written in
the Tower while More waited for death (for all he knew, death by torture,
hanging, cutting down, alive, and disembowelling)” he saw “a fairly close
parallel” to Boethius’ Consolation of
Philosophy. Lewis concludes his reflections on the Dialogue with the remark that “I would not quote much from this
book; it is (or was) accessible in a cheap reprint and should be on everyone’s
shelves” (English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century, Book II, I.1, pp. 177-181).

Written in 1534, first published
anonymously in 1553 and reprinted with More’s Utopia in Everyman’s Library in 1910, the Dialogue was edited “with modifications to obsolete
language” by Monica Stevens in 1951. The above quotation is from
the Stevens edition, available online from Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17075; a
PDF is available at www.lewisiana.nl/screwtapequotes/More1534.pdf.
A good later edition is the one by Frank Manley (Yale University Press 1977),
with Lewis’s quote on page 158.

Preface

The
history of the European War

»
The Second World War formally started on 1 September 1939. In Great Britain,
the war was initially a matter mainly of mobilization, without much obvious
enemy action directly affecting the daily life of citizens. In the early summer
of 1940, when large parts of the European continent had been conquered and
occupied by Germany, the “Battle of Britain” began as German bombers began to
raid cities in England, notably London. The
Screwtape Letters were probably written during the second half of 1940.
They were originally published as a serial in a Church of England weekly
magazine called The Guardian, from
May till November 1941.

I

as
if you supposed that argument was the way

»
The opening theme of TheScrewtape Letters is that of a column
(“Notes on the Way”) which Lewis wrote for the literary magazine Time and Tide, published on
29 March 1941; the first Screwtape letter followed on 2 May 1941 in The Guardian. Two years later Lewis was
to develop the Time and Tide piece
into a paper for the Oxford University Socratic Club: “Bulverism, or The
Foundation of Twentieth-Century Thought” (for publication details about this
paper see www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays).

II

“the
body of Christ”

»
1 Corinthians 12:27; Ephesians 4:12.

III

the elder brother in the Enemy’s
story

»
Luke 15:25ff, the parable of the Prodigal Son.

IV

Coleridge,
“with moving lips and bended knees”

»
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet and philosopher. The words
quoted are from “The Pains of Sleep” (1803, published 1816), a 52-line poem
which begins as follows:

Ere
on my bed my limbs I lay,

It
hath not been my use to pray

With
moving lips or bended knees;

But
silently, by slow degrees,

My
spirit I to Love compose,

In
humble trust mine eye-lids close,

With
reverential resignation,

No
wish conceived, no thought exprest,

Only
a sense of supplication;

A
sense o’er all my soul imprest

That
I am weak, yet not unblest,

Since
in me, round me, every where

Eternal
Strength and Wisdom are.

“Not to what I think thou art but to
what thou knowest thyself to be”

» ??[the
original may be in Latin, perhaps in Augustine or Anselm]

VIII

when
a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will ...
asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys

»
cf. Matthew 27:47, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

See
also George Macdonald, “The Eloi”, in Unspoken
Sermons Vol. I (1867), quoted by Lewis in his Macdonald
Anthology (1946), Nr. 38:

The highest
condition of the Human Will, as distinct, not as separated from God, is when, not
seeing God, not seeming to itself to grasp Him at all, it yet holds Him fast.

XI

“No
passion is as serious as lust”

» ??

XII

“without whom Nothing is strong”

»
Slightly adapted (with a capital N for Nothing) from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer (Fourth Sunday
After Trinity, The Collect):

O God, the
protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is
holy: Increase and multiply upon us they mercy ...

XIII

Childe
Harold

»
Principal character in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (1812), a poem in four
cantos by George Byron (1788-1824). The hero is a young man who disillusioned
with his empty pleasure-seeking existence and looks for distraction in far-away
places.

Werther

»
Principal character in Die Leiden des jungenWerther (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther),
the first novel published by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).

active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive
ones are weakened

»
Joseph Butler (1692-1752), The Analogy of
Religion (1736), Part I, “Natural Religion”, chapter 5, “Of a State of Probation, as Intended for
Moral Discipline and Improvement”, section II.

... in like manner as habits belonging to
the body are produced by external acts: so habits of the mind are produced by
the exertion of inward practical principles; i.e. by carrying them into
act, or acting upon them; the principles of obedience, of veracity, justice,
and charity. (...) But going over the theory of virtue in one’s thoughts,
talking well, and drawing fine pictures, of it; this is so far from necessarily
or certainly conducing to form a habit of it, in him who thus employs himself,
that it may harden the mind in a contrary course, and render it gradually more
insensible; i. e. form a habit of
insensibility to all moral considerations. For, from our very faculty of
habits, passive impressions, by being repeated, grow weaker. Thoughts, by often
passing through the mind, are felt less sensibly: being accustomed to danger,
begets intrepidity, i. e. lessens fear;
to distress, lessens the passion of pity; to instances of others’ mortality,
lessens the sensible apprehension of our own. And from these two observations
together; that practical habits are formed and strengthened by repeated acts,
and that passive impressions grow weaker by being repeated upon us; it must
follow, that active habits may be gradually forming and strengthening, by a
course of acting upon such and such motives and excitements, whilst these
motives and excitements themselves are, by proportionable
degrees, growing less sensible; i. e.
are continually less and less sensibly felt, even as the active habits
strengthen.

XV

Creative
Evolution

»
A concept developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1858-1941); his
book Évolutioncréatrice was
published in 1907 (English: Creative
Evolution, 1911) and won him the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Scientific
Humanism

»
The term does not designate any recognized school of thought, but has been used
since the 19th century by some
thinkers to specify and recommend their own variety of modern, secular
humanism. This variety more or less originated with the English biologist
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). His grandson Julian Huxley advocated “a scientific Humanism,
global in extent and evolutionary in background” as guiding philosophy for the
newly formed United Nations shortly after the Second World War. In 2005, the
American biologist E. O. Wilson called scientific humanism “the only worldview
compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of
nature” and the one most likely to lead to a better world.

This
is not straw splitting

» Typo alert
– From the 1955 Fontana edition of The
Screwtape Letters onward, many editions have the erroneous text “This is nowstraw splitting.”

Thou
wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy: at thy right
hand there are pleasures for evermore.

“the
regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is
silence”

»
From George Macdonald (1824-1905), Unspoken
Sermons I (1867), “The Hands of the Father”.

Nor shall we
ever know that repose in the Father’s hands, that rest of the Holy Sepulchre,
which the Lord knew when the agony of death was over, when the storm of the
world died away behind his retiring spirit, and he entered the regions where
there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence, (for all
noise comes of the conflict of Life and Death) – we shall never be able, I say,
to rest in the bosom of the Father, till the fatherhood is fully revealed to us
in the love of the brothers.

»
An allusion to the Anglo-Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950; 1925
Nobel Prize for Literature). His ideas about a Life Force (a term related to
Henri Bergson’s élan vital), were
expressed in his play Man and Superman
(1903) and most notably in the preface and fifth part of Back to Methuselah (1921).

XXIII

the
World and the Flesh ... a third Power remains

»
Cf. the phrase from the Church of England’s Book
of Common Prayer, Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, The Collect:

Lord, we
beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world,
the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee the
only God ...

Screwtape
hardly defines his “third Power” but obviously he reckons Religion to be a
great stimulus to diabolical attitudes. He comes back to this at the end of the
table speech which was published an appendix to The Screwtape Letters in 1961, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”. There
he describes “different types of Pharisees” in hell thus:

Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others
were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine
or cards or the theatre. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the
almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy
really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live
doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its
litany. How they hated each other up there where the sun shone! How much more
they hate each other now that they are forever conjoined but not reconciled.
Their astonishment, their resentment, at the combination, the festering of
their eternally impenitent spite, passing into our spiritual digestion, will
work like fire. Dark fire. All said and done, my friends, it will be an ill day
for us if what most humans mean by “religion” ever vanishes from the Earth. It can
still send us the truly delicious sins. The fine flower of unholiness
can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so
successfully as on the very steps of the altar.

the
documents ... cannot be added to

»
This idea was actually proved false when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered
in the later 1940s, not many years after Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters. He briefly deals with this issue in his Reflections on the Psalms (1958),
chapter 3.

a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares, new Swifts

» Biography has long been a popular branch of
literature in Great Britain. Old subjects keep attracting new biographers, and
new biographies are usually published with a pretence that some really new
facts or insights are being offered.Lewis made the same combined
criticism of the modern “quest for the historical Jesus” and the biography
industry in his 1940 paper “Why I am not a Pacifist” (first published in the US
the 1980 edition of The Weight of Glory and other Addressesen in the UK in Timeless at Heart, 1987).

Sophists ... Socrates

»
In the decades around 400 B.C., Sophists were itinerant teachers in ancient
Greece, especially influential in Athens. Two famous early Sophists were Protagoras
and Gorgias; an extreme case was Callicles (in
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias). Their
sceptical and relativist ideas were systematically refuted in the course of
their debates with Socrates, as described in Plato’s dialogues.

It should be added that Socrates was
really active on two fronts: he “found himself confronted both by moral conservatives using an incoherent moral vocabulary as
if they were sure of its meaning and
by sophists whose innovations he found equally suspect” – Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (2nd ed., 1998),
chapter 3, “The Sophists and Socrates”, p. 18 (italics added). An excellent
brief treatment of the antagonism, both in its historical and its timeless
aspects, can be found in an essay by Juan F. Frank, “The Platonic Inspiration of Pieper’s
Philosophy”, in: Bernard
N. Schu­macher (ed.), A Cosmopolitan Hermit. Modernity and Tradition in the Philosophy of
Josef Pieper,
CUA Press, Washington
D.C. 2009, pp. 251-278.

a Christian writer ... recommends his own version of
Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old
cultures and the birth of new civilisations”

A vital
Christian faith and life is thus under the necessity of perennially preserving
its health against the peril of diseases and corruptions arising out of its own
life; and of protecting itself against errors to which non-mythical religions
tempt it. Most of its own weaknesses arise when the mythical paradoxes of its
faith are resolved; most of the perils from the outside come from the pessimism
and dualism of mystical and rational religion. Only a vital Christian faith,
renewing its youth in its prophetic origin, is capable of dealing adequately
with the moral and social problems of our age; only such a faith can affirm the
significance of temporal and mundane existence without capitulating unduly to
the relativities of the temporal process. Such a faith alone can point to a
source of meaning which transcends all the little universes of value and
meaning which “have their day and cease to be” and yet not seek refuge in an
eternal world where all history ceases to be significant. Only such a faith
can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations,
and yet deal in terms of moral responsibility with the world in which cultures
and civilizations engage in struggles of death and life.

XXV

merely
Christian ... mere Christianity

»
“Mere Christianity” is an expression borrowed from a passage in Church-history of the Government of Bishops
and their Councils (1680) by the English Puritan theologian and church
leader RichardBaxter (1615-1691). On
the book’s title page Baxter calls himself “a hater of false history”. On the
penultimate unnumbered page [xv] of an introductory passage, “What History is
Credible, and what not”, he writes:

... but you know
not what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than
for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER
CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian
Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath
been visible: But must you know what Sect or Party I am of? I am against all
Sects and dividing parties: But if any will call Meer Christians by the name of a Party, because they take up with meerChristianity, Creed, and Scripture, and will not be of any dividing
or contentious Sect, I am of that Party which is so against Parties: If the
Name CHRISTIAN be not enough, call me a CATHOLICK CHRISTIAN; not as that word signifieth an hereticating
majority of Bishops, but as it signifieth one that
hath no Religion, but that which by Christ and the Apostles was left to the Catholick Church, or the Body of Jesus Christ on Earth.

Lewis
made the same reference to Baxter in the title for his collected and revised
radio talks of the years 1941-1944: Mere
Christianity. He explained this choice in his Preface to that book,
published in 1952. Earlier that same year he used Baxter’s term in a letter to
the editor of the Church Times (8
Feb. 1952; Collected Letters vol. III,
p. 164).

Byronic

»
i.e. in the manner of Lord Byron, the Romantic poet whose Childe Harold was referred to in chapter XIII, above.

whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or
tyrants

»
Lewis probably intended this as a brief diagnosis of modern society’s most
virulent disease at the time of writing, i.e. the 1940s. This same diagnosis
found famous expression in F. A. Hayek’s the
Road to Serfdom (1944) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

XXVI

the
negative unselfishness

» The
manners described here may be typically British rather than generally human.

“If people knew how much ill-feeling Unselfishness occasions, it would not
be so often recommended from the pulpit”

» ??

“She’s
the sort of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by
their hunted expression”

» ??–Lewis may well be quoting
himself here.

XXVII

“praise
and communion with God is the true prayer”

» ??

Boethius

» Anicius Manlius Severinus Boetius,
Roman statesman and philosopher (480-524). As a prisoner of the Gothic king Theoderic he wrote The
Consolation of Philosophy (De consolationephilosophiae).
Screwtape is referring to this book’s last, fifth part. Boethius as a thinker
about the problem of freedom is discussed in C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image (1964), chapter IV/D (“I cannot help thinking
that Boethius has here expounded a Platonic conception more luminously than
Plato ever did himself”).

Only
the learned read old books

»
In a piece written in 1944 Lewis explained the importance of not confining
one’s reading to contemporary authors:

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the
twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask; “But how could they have thought
that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about
which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt ... None of us can fully escape this
blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it,
if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths
which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error
with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the
clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be
done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about
the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many
mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the
errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and
palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because
either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same
direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a
corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

Originally
the preface to a translation of St. Athanasius (The Incarnation of the Word of God), this piece was later published
as “On the Reading of Old Books”; for bibliographical details see www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.

bunk

»
A reference to the assertion “History is more or less bunk”, made by Henry Ford
(1863-1947), pioneer and captain of car industry, during an interview published
in the Chicago Tribune of 25 May
1916. The saying got wings in the briefer form “History is bunk”. During a
lawsuit brought by Ford against the Chicago
Tribune in 1919, his own astounding lack of historical knowledge was
revealed when he guessed 1812 as the year of the American Revolution. When
reminded of his notorious maxim, he backed out by explaining that he “did not
say it was bunk. It was bunk to me [...] but I did not need it very bad.”

For as regards nature, experience presents us
with rules and is the source of truth, but in relation to ethical laws
experience is the parent of illusion, and it is in the highest degree
reprehensible to limit or to deduce the laws which dictate what I ought to do,
from what is done.

...
courage is a sort of retention ... I mean the retention of the notion, which
has been inculcated by law through the agency of education, about what things
and what kinds of things are to be feared. And by its retention “under all
circumstances” I meant keeping it intact and not losing it whether one is under
the influence of pain or pleasure, desire or aversion. ... So this ability to
retain under all circumstances a true and lawful notion about what is and is
not to be feared is what I’m calling courage.